There is an image in this trailer for Beyond the Black Rainbow in which a silhouetted woman seems to crawl out of the pupil in a screen-filling close-up of a human eye. It’s beautiful and weird, and that’s the trailer in a nutshell. Watching this, I have no idea what this film is about. I do know that it is the writing and directing debut of Panos Cosmatos, and that it played a few festivals in the past couple years, premiering in the US last year at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Watching the trailer again I also know that Cosmatos is a big fan of Stanley Kubrick and early David Cronenberg, as well as probably any esoteric bits of psychedelic science fiction from the late ’60s through the early ’80s. (There’s even a vibe of Matt Howarth comics, although Howarth seems to be so close to forgotten that I don’t expect that means much to many people now.) I can tell that the film is probably very, very slow and destined to drive some audiences crazy, but that just makes me want to see it a bit more. Read More »